Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
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Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#2One difference though is that all baseball cards were acquired for pennies originally, then grew in value. You don't have to spend a month of heavy-duty electrical bills or $50K to buy a fresh baseball card or a beanie baby or a pez dispenser.
Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#3A key difference between collectibles and bitcoin/cryptocurrency is that collectibles don't claim to be money nor are they trying to replace current money systems. I'm no expert on money, how it works and how it gets value, but I would be interested to find an article discussing whether cryptocurrency has enough of the qualities of "money" to replace any current money system.
Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#4One difference though is that all baseball cards were acquired for pennies originally, then grew in value. You don't have to spend a month of heavy-duty electrical bills or $50K to buy a fresh baseball card or a beanie baby or a pez dispenser.
you can’t use a beanie baby or baseball card as a permissionless, decentralised, censorship resistant global remittance tool.
That said, BTC lacking the fungible property of sound money is a glaring issue.
Though a money system like Monero may end up becoming very important global money for the internet age.
I think the author is shortsighted.
Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#5Addendum:
Now imagine that these baseball cards, instead of featuring professional baseball players, instead featured people who had run on a giant hamster wheel for some time at some speed. Also, the more baseball cards that get made, the longer/faster the person has to run on the hamster wheel.
Initially, you could run on the giant hamster wheel for a few minutes and make a baseball card. Now, because so many baseball cards have been made, you have to run for months on a giant hamster wheel.
Eventually, professional athletes figure out that instead of using their athletic prowess to play sports, they can actually make more money by taking their athletic ability and running on giant hamster wheels. In addition, many metal shops have also figured out that instead of making other stuff, they can maximize their revenue by instead concentrating on making giant hamster wheels so people can run on them to make these cards.
Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#6One difference though is that all baseball cards were acquired for pennies originally, then grew in value. You don't have to spend a month of heavy-duty electrical bills or $50K to buy a fresh baseball card or a beanie baby or a pez dispenser.
> You don't have to spend a month of heavy-duty electrical bills or $50K to buy a fresh baseball card
You didn't have to do that to get bitcoin until recently either.
And even today, you don't have to mine. You can purchase bitcoin for whatever amount in USD, and like baseball cards, it'll (probably) grow in value.
Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#7The funny thing is that Bitcoin will basically only have value as a collectible as long as substantial numbers of people believe this essay’s argument is false.
People want to collect bitcoin at current valuations because they are convinced it will become a currency/store of value of the future and hence rise in value.
If everyone suddenly switched to believing “Oh bitcoin doesn’t do anything but it is a fun collectible which also has mining costs to track ownership” its value would plummet.
Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#8Something this article misses though is that Bitcoin, unlike stamps and Beanie Babies, is digital, which I'd argue makes a huge difference.
Imagine if you could exchange Beanie Babies with anyone in the world with an internet (or satellite) connection. That seems...at least a little more useful?
Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#9I don't agree with this assessment at all. I think the immense value of bitcoin and other technologically advanced, secure, decentralized networks comes from the detailed network communications which they enable. They allow global financial transactions through a powerful medium in a way that has never existed before. This has nothing to do with baseball cards. The fact that decentralized networks enable NFTs and collectibles is a small subset of the value and power of decentralized networks.
The network is the value. To me, this is what bitcoin is. https://medium.com/the-capital/the-network-is-the-value-an-e...
Re: Bitcoin has few attributes of money but all the attributes of a collectible
#10I really don't care getting downvoted, but I really think this is the worst explanation of what bitcoin is.
There's a book that I strongly recommend to the author of this article: the bitcoin standard.
The book gives also some fundamentals of what money is, and what bitcoin solves and can solve. (talking also about bitcoin layers)
I understand this is a divisive topic, but there's really nothing to with the baseball cards here.